I didn’t know it. For a little AWOL, hijacking and black-market stuff in West Germany, they had given me ten in Leavenworth. The reviewing authority had set me loose after thirty-seven months. With a dishonorable discharge on the record, people like me had best make some contacts in Leavenworth for work on the outside, or else settle down to a life of manual labor. My army background had given me some skills useful to the organization, and I knew who to go to when I was released.
I’d been here with Chowder’s group for a little over a year at five hundred a week, and had drawn only four assignments in that time, each one involving using muscle on people who felt that they deserved a larger slice of the sucker money than the organization was willing to give them. Oh, there had been a lot of small errands for Chowder. Go leave off the Continental and pick up the Mercedes. Stop on the way back for that case of wine.
In the real action, I had given them their money’s worth.
“Why are you talking about the investment in me?”
“Because this is a different kind of deal, Wally. This one is what you could call maybe a permanent fix.”
“Then you should send somebody too dumb to care what happens later. I have this aversion to electric furniture.”
He ignored me. “This one comes from the very top. Up until six months ago the company was grossing fifteen thousand a week out of Bruerton. That’s in upstate New York. Our local guy is Sid Marion. You met him at the meeting. The gross is from machines, books and grass.”
I waited patiently. “So when the gross sagged off to eight a week, the big man called Sid in and found out that a couple of years ago they put the cops on a merit basis, and six months ago the old Chief of Police died, and a younger man, this James Fosting, was put in. He can’t be bought. We can buy the number two in line, but that doesn’t do us any good while Fosting is there. The loss comes to a total of three hundred and fifty big ones a year, so the big man asked Sid to go to work on the new chief. Smear him. Buy him. Whatever. What happened was that even more of the action got closed down. There are a hundred and forty thousand people in that town up there. It should turn twenty thousand a week, not six. The front office has confidence in you, Wally. He’s yours.”
“Isn’t it work for a button man? Like you can borrow one from St. Louis or someplace.”
“No, because then the locals get very upset, and maybe our number two man won’t get in after all. This has to be accidental, Wally. Very smooth and very cool. You are coming along nice. You are very bright. I keep telling them that.”
“Thanks. I’m bright enough so I know that five hundred a week doesn’t buy that kind of work.”
“There’s a bonus authorized if you make out okay.”
“Like how much?”
“Like twenty.”
I thought it over and did some mental arithmetic. “Twenty is fine, plus ten percent of the total gross for the first year after he’s gone.”
Chowder shook his head sadly. “Wally, you should know I can’t go back to the front office with a crazy idea like that.”
At the door to the bedroom I turned and said, “While I’m dressing, maybe you should contact somebody and get an okay—or go get somebody else.”
“Will you drop down just a little?”
“Let’s get their offer first. Okay?”
I showered, shaved, put on a white shirt, the new cord suit, knotting the pale blue tie just the way I like it. I looked over the finished product in the full-length bedroom mirror. When I was eighteen, a lady told me that I reminded her of a big sleepy blond cat. She told me my eyes had a cold look.
I always think of her when I look in the mirror.
When I came back out, Chowder said, “He’ll go along at seven and a half percent.”
I walked to the door. “Okay. A deal.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
I grinned at him. “First, I’m going downstairs and get my girl out of the bar. Then I’m coming back here and draw five thousand bucks advance. Then she’s going to pack my stuff, and I’m leaving for Bruerton. Okay with you?”
Gloria was at a corner table, and a slicker type had moved in on her. Gloria likes games. When she saw me coming, she unwrapped her fingers from the glass, and slapped her palm across the dummy’s mouth. He was one startled guy.
He looked up at me and Gloria pouted and said, “Honey, this man has been annoying me.”
I just looked at him. He knew his cards had come off the bottom of the deck. For three seconds he thought it over. Then he got up and slid away fast. I realized I was getting weary of Gloria’s little tricks.
“Why didn’t you hit him?” she demanded.
“Come on,” I said. “Time to pack.”
The eager light came into her eyes. Gloria likes far places. She likes to be on the move.
But she was disappointed. I checked her packing job on my stuff, folded the crisp bills Chowder gave me out of the safe, went in to where Gloria was packing her own rags and said, “Snap it up, baby.”
She smiled up at me. I told Chowder what I planned for Gloria and tipped the doorman off too. She was to wait in front for me while I got the car. I stacked her bags on the sidewalk and carried mine around to the car. I grinned to myself as I waited for a light six blocks away, thinking of the expression on Gloria’s face when she finally realized I wasn’t picking her up and she couldn’t get back into the building. The doorman would have a hard time scaring her off. In a week she’d cool off and be back at her job as dice girl in one of the bars.
It’s kid stuff to barrel along in a car like a big shot. I kept the needle right on fifty-five.
The bad thing about driving is that it gives you too much time to think. I had hoped to inch my way up in the organization without ever having the pressure on too hard. This was a horse of a new color. It gave me the trembles. It had been a long time since I had killed a man. The last one was in a Hamburg alley two weeks before I was picked up in the big raid. And that hadn’t been a pretty one. We couldn’t risk a shot, and I had to whip him to death with the gun barrel. He had been softening up and we were afraid he was going to the MPs, to clear himself by turning us in.
But that had been sort of a spur-of-the-moment deal. I remembered how sick to my stomach I had been after it was over. This was worse. This was more cold-blooded. I had the idea that it had been Chowder who recommended me for the job, hoping that I would foul up. I knew that Chowder was afraid of me.
The difference was in the background, I guess. When Chowder was a kid, he had been brought up in comfortable middle-class surroundings. While his mother was tucking him in bed, I had been sneaking out over the orphanage wall with Mick and Chucky, heading through the dark streets down to the waterfront, rolling the drunks we hauled into the alleys.
When I was fifteen, I drove for two crazy guys who specialized in gas stations. They chiseled me on my cut and I quit them the week before they stepped into a trap. It hadn’t been pretty. Their new driver caught one over the ear and sheared off a gas pump and they went up in flame and black smoke.
Rufe Ventano was the guy who smartened me up. During the three years I worked for him, making book, he taught me how to dress and act. He taught me the right line of chatter and the proper fork to use. The week he was dying in bed of pneumonia, I was picked up on a breaking and entering, and the court gave me a choice of state prison or the U.S. Army. I enlisted the day they buried Rufe.
After Basic I had another long training session at Benning for the Airborne. I found out I was not crazy wild about jumping out of airplanes and wangled a transfer to the MPs. I took their training and got sent to Germany. After a month of watching the clumsy crooks making big dough, I moved in. During the seven months I was AWOL, I made two hundred thousand dollars. I had it in hundred-dollar bills. When they closed in, I buried the fat stacks behind a rock in the subcellar we used as a headquarters.
As I drove toward Bruerton, I realized that if I could carry off the job they had gi
ven me, I could ask for a month off. The dough I would get, if properly placed, would get me legitimately to Germany. I wanted to dig behind that rock.
With the two hundred thousand, I could buy myself a little talent among the syndicate personnel, enough to move Chowder out of my way and take over his job.
So it all depended on how I worked it out with James Fosting, Chief of Police of Bruerton.
I left the car in a storage garage and took a cab to the hotel. I signed in as Thomas Quinn, giving a Chicago address.
My room with bath in the Stanley Hotel in Bruerton was that size where you can’t open the room door and the bureau drawer at the same time. The bed was narrow and hard. But it was a respectable hotel. That was important.
With the room door locked, I sat on the bed and went over, for the twentieth time, a few of the tentative plans I had made on the road. The day was fairly cool for September, so, after a shower, I changed to a tweed coat and gabardine slacks.
I got some of my shopping done that first day. I bought a used portable typewriter, a ream of paper and a briefcase. Then I had the room clerk get on the ball and get a suitable table for my room.
The other little item was more important. I had to be careful about it. After breakfast the second day, I walked around, heading toward the shabbiest part of the business district, until at last I found a print shop that looked next door to bankruptcy.
A bell jangled when I went in, and an old guy in a green eyeshade came out peering nervously through the gloom.
Even though I explained carefully that it was a joke I was playing on a friend, he didn’t want to cooperate until I let him see the corner of the twenty-dollar bill. I waited while he ran off the letterhead I wanted. It looked okay, and I paid him the twenty for five copies on his best-quality bond paper.
The letterhead was that of one of the top-flight publishing houses.
Back in the room, I wrote a rough draft of the letter, and then carefully typed it, I addressed it to my fake name, Mr. Thomas Quinn, at the address I had given on the register card when I checked in.
Dear Tom,
Bill and I are really enthusiastic about the job you’ve done this time. There certainly is a need right now for this sort of book.
We would like to go ahead with it as it stands, but Bill says it could be longer than the present 70,000 words.
We talked it over and have decided that, along with the other men, you should include about twenty thousand words on a man named James Fosting who has been doing an outstanding job of cleaning up Bruerton, New York. He is Chief of Police there.
Make it the same sort of intimate biography technique that you used on the others. Find out how he thinks, what he eats, where he goes for amusement—all that in addition to the main job of finding out the reason for his success.
You can use this letter with him, if it will help. By the way, how would you feel about changing the title to “Men Who Make Our Cities”? Sound okay to you?
A check for your advance will go out sometime next week.
Sincerely,
Al Justin
In composing the letter, I was aided by the three years of education I received while locked up. If I made Fosting suspicious in any way, he would check back with the publishing house. I had to carry off the act, and do it well.
My next job was to go to the public library, read some of the articles in municipal journals and make a list of a few men who were written up with loud praise. I was careful to select them from cities with which I was reasonably familiar.
From a drugstore phone booth, I called the number Chowder had given me for Sid Marion. When he came on the line I said, “Sid, just listen and don’t ask questions. I’ve come here to help out. You know who sent me. You met me at the annual meeting. Don’t blink an eye if you see me in funny company. I’ll call on you, if and when I need help.”
I hung up before he could answer. I had the feeling that the further I stayed from Sid Marion, the better I could operate. If he had been on his toes, he would have thrown some syndicate dough around in the Common Council to spike the police merit system before it ever got underway.
I expected that he would be surrounded with the usual group of amateur and semipro sharpies, ward heelers and buck-hungry hangers-on.
For guaranteeing him freedom from competition and a war chest to tide him over the rough times and legal talent to keep him out of the pokey—the syndicate stepped in to take half his net. A syndicate spy had, of course, been sent in to make certain that Sid wasn’t holding out.
The way the force was set up, the Deputy Chief had his office at Police Headquarters, and the Chief had an office over in City Hall, adjoining the office of the Commissioner of Public Safety.
I went in, sat on the bench in the outer office and spent some happy moments admiring the talent he had at the secretarial desk before I got the call to enter the sanctum.
James Fosting turned out to be a tall guy with a long leathery-looking face. About thirty-five, I guessed. He wore the local equivalent of a Brooks Brothers suit, and under the high forehead, the blue eyes had a harsh and knowing gleam.
I gave him my best-variety smile and handed him the letter. I didn’t sit down until he asked me to. There are cops who claim that they can tell a wrongo in one third of a second. Those cops have holes in their heads. No hick cop has ever made me on first look. You have to have presence. And a nice, open, honest smile.
I sat and watched him read the letter. His eyes flicked down it, then he started in again from the beginning and read it more slowly.
“Hmmmmm,” he said. “Very flattering, Mr. Quinn. I’m honored.”
“Can I assume that it’s okay with you, Chief?”
“With strings. One—I took over a very bad situation here, Mr. Quinn. Very bad. Straightening it out is still a fourteen-hour-a-day job. I can’t slight that job. You’ll have to get a lot of your information secondhand. Two—I want to read every word you write, and approve the final draft. One wrong sentence, and my political enemies might use it as an excuse to move me out of here.”
I knew he was normal, and I knew he had swallowed the hook. I didn’t even have to give the line a yank to set the hook.
Already he was thinking of himself in that book. City builder. Ha!
He had been crisp and businesslike, but now he had that old pleased gleam in his eye. He pushed a button on his desk.
The lush item came in briskly. “Miss Calder, this is Mr. Quinn.” I stood up, and we nodded at each other.
“Mr. Quinn is including a write-up of me in a book that has been accepted by a good publishing house. What shape is your work in?”
“I’m nearly caught up.”
“Good. I’m assigning you to Mr. Quinn. Have Miss Willington take over your desk. Explain the ropes to her. You are at liberty to give Mr. Quinn any information he may request. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was still standing. Chief Fosting stood up too. He stuck his hand out, and I took it. “When she’s given you all she knows, come to me to get the blanks filled in.”
I sat patiently on the bench again while Miss Calder finished a few letters and got hold of a chubby item named Willington and gave her the routine. Willington acted nervous, but pleased.
She sat on the other side of the booth.
I think of women in terms of music. I don’t know why. Gloria was barrelhouse piano with a driving bass.
There have been women who were bright, raw trumpet, or the gutty blast of a trombone. One or two have been a tom-tom beat.
But this Janet Calder was something else. A string section. Violins. The longhair brand of music. But neither cool nor faint nor dull.
She was nineteen or twenty. Blond. A wide, sensitive mouth, with a flare to her nostrils and wide eyes of a blue-violet shade. Keen eyes. They didn’t look as if they’d miss a great deal.
Her young body was almost excessively feminine, but she didn’t throw it around. She carried herself in
a way that showed she could swim, play tennis, ride. Her hands and arms were tanned. Her eyebrows made her hair look dyed, which it wasn’t. They were thick black eyebrows, unplucked. They made me want to lean across the table between us and run the tip of my finger along them. They looked as though they would feel like fur.
Fosting knew what he was doing when he attached me to her for information. I scribbled in my prop notebook while she filled in the background.
It was an unusual background. Law degree. FBI before Vietnam. G-2 during that war. He had come back to his hometown in late ’77 just as the merit system went in. And he had become a rookie cop. With his talents, he passed the competitive examinations with a rating and performance record that got him up to sergeant in the middle of 1978, lieutenant by the spring of 1979, captain by Christmas of 1979. Oddly, the other men on the force didn’t resent his extremely rapid rise. When the Chief died, his grading was tops, and he moved into the hot spot.
I asked a few questions, scribbled down the answers.
“How come you know him so well, Janet?” I asked.
I saw the faint blush. She spun her Coke glass in a wet pool on the black marble tabletop, making a pattern of interlocking rings. She watched those rings as though they were very important and said, “My dad was a policeman for years. I was in business school when Dad was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 1977. Chief Fosting, then a rookie, took an interest in me and saw that there was enough money for me to finish the course. Then he helped me get a job.”
“Nice guy,” I said casually.
“It’s stronger than that!” she snapped. “He’s—he’s a wonderful man. I respect him and admire him more than any man I’ve ever met. He’s fair and honest and …”
I grinned at her. “How long have you been in love with him?”
For a minute I was afraid I had gone too far. Her face got white and her lips were firmly compressed. She had been calling me Tom, as per agreement, but she said, “Mr. Quinn, I hardly think that your job gives you any right to—”
“Hey, wait a minute, Janet!” I said. “I was just kidding. Take it easy. He’s a nice-looking guy and I thought you two maybe had some arrangement.”
More Good Old Stuff Page 28